A 5-2 Supreme Court today reverses a criminal-street-gang enhancement that was added onto sentences for attempted voluntary manslaughter and assault with a firearm. People v. Prunty concerns the organizational structure of street gangs and their affiliates, and what showing the prosecution must make to establish a defendant acted for the benefit of a gang. The four-justice majority opinion written by Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, for himself and Justices Kathryn Werdegar, Goodwin Liu, and Leondra Kruger, concludes that “when the prosecution seeks to prove the street gang enhancement by showing a defendant committed a felony to benefit a given gang, but establishes the commission of the required predicate offenses with evidence of crimes committed by members of the gang’s alleged subsets, it must prove a connection between the gang and the subsets.”
Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, joined by Justice Ming Chin, would affirm the enhancement. In her concurring and dissenting opinion, the Chief Justice chides the majority for reweighing the evidence and not giving sufficient deference to the jury’s factual determinations. Justice Carol Corrigan also writes a concurring and dissenting opinion, but she agrees with the majority that the evidence was inadequate to support the gang enhancement. However, she disagrees “with any suggestion that different [gang] subsets must acknowledge each other as part of a larger group, or that the umbrella group and a subset must somehow ‘mutually acknowledge’ each other.”
The court reverses the Third District Court of Appeal. It finds itself in sync with a 2009 Fifth District Court of Appeal opinion, with which the Court of Appeal in this case disagreed. But the court disapproves a 2006 Third District Court of Appeal opinion and a 2003 Sixth District Court of Appeal opinion.